Fedora 9 Preview Release Experience

[Clyde E. Kunkel]

Installed nicely 1084 packages in less than 15 minutes using DVD.  The 
installation sequence and prompts are the best I have seen so far. 
Gnome desktop seems very fast and responsive.  My ATI 2600 PCI-E card 
was detected and the proper screen resolution was set as default--a 
first for me.

Do not see any new issues yet, except a minor one in that 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraExt4 says to use extr in the install 
cmdline.  Should be ext4 in order to test this filesystem.

Observations (all have been reported previously during alpha and beta):

1) installer is inconsistent in detecting hard drive sequence.  First 
two attempts to install (while I was figuring out ext4 vice extr) 
reported SATA drives ahead of ide drives.  Final try, with ext4, saw ide 
drive first which is the way the bios reports it if you enter the bios 
setup screen and look.  lspci always shows the SATA controllers ahead of 
the ide controllers.

2) CIFS filesystems don't mount when fstab processed, but do get mounted 
sometime before desktop (gnome) settles in.

3)  shutdown/restart msgs still don't display unless the user knows to 
ctr-alt-f7 to see them.

4) CIFS filesystems take a long time to umount on shutdown/restart since 
networkmanager has closed the network.  This may not seem like a big 
deal, but unless the user knows to ctr-alt-f7 to see shutdown msgs, the 
user will wonder why shutdown is taking so long and may start hard/soft 
reboot attempts.

5) Did not find system-config-lvm as one of the packages to install. 
Had to yum install it.  I may have missed it during the install, but I 
looked in what I thought were the obvious places.

6) System-config-lvm still thinks an ext4 LV doesn't have any 
filesystem, nor does it offer an ext4 option when creating a new LV.

7) hwbrowser still doesn't show any hard drives, have to use gparted to 
see everything in a GUI.

These are minor issues in my opinion, and I think they are easily 
resolvable at some point after showstoppers are resolved.  The LV ext4 
issue bz even has a patch waiting in the wings.

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Regards,

Old Fart